ABSTRACT
No memorial marks 588 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, where, in 1899, Martin Simonsen committed suicide, having exhausted life, family, and money in producing opera. To succeed, opera must bring together complex, creative individuals, negotiating the obstacles of anxiety, mishap, and dissension, as well as technical, physical, and financial failure. To lead an audience into this world of sight and sound, risking public rejection, requires a powerful emotional compulsion. Committing one’s family to such an enterprise in the colonial Antipodes required the seemingly irresistible resolution of a Fanny and Martin Simonsen, partners in a forty-year marriage devoted to opera. This discussion focuses on the risks and sacrifices made, as a measure of how greatly the emotional rewards were valued, by Simonsen, his wife Fanny, and their family.
